This electronic star failed high school music. But it didn't stop her
'I knew my way around a DAW [digital audio workstation], so I was like, 'I can do this, this is what I'm good at!'' she recalls. 'So I made this cool thing using presets and I handed it in like, 'I killed that, no one's gonna have anything as good as that.''
It did not go well. 'I got back this really shit mark! The feedback was that I had used a violin preset and a violin can't physically play what I put in. I was like, 'Oh OK, I see that we're not on the same page here.''
As origin stories go, it couldn't be more precise: the electronic artist set on her path after challenging the possibilities of traditional music. 'That's the thing, I didn't even care,' the 25-year-old DJ and producer says. 'They had wanted us to compose for a real instrument, but I was on a different wavelength already.'
Ninajirachi, real name Nina Wilson, is posing in between claw machines at games arcade Koko, looking at home in its futuristic Blade Runner glow. Her blunt red fringe pokes from under her black hoodie, which she removes to reveal an oversized shirt with the slogan 'I wanna f--- my computer', a provocative rendering of the title – and thematic drive – of her new album, I Love My Computer.
'That was a voice memo I had from early 2024,' Wilson says, laughing. 'I had just finished making something that sounded really good, and I was thinking about those memes that are like, 'Listening to music isn't enough, I need to f--- the song.''
Coming almost a decade after her first single as Ninajirachi (her moniker is a portmanteau of her first name and Jirachi, her favourite Pokemon, a plush version of which hangs from her handbag), and having built a reputation as one of Australia's most esteemed and idiosyncratic electronic artists, the album is somehow Wilson's debut full-length. 'I guess I just didn't feel like it until now,' she says. 'Maybe it would have been good for my career to put out an album five years ago, but I just didn't have the vision or the idea for it until now.'
Across its 12 noisy and affecting tracks, Wilson charts a life entwined with computers and the internet and the way 'computer music' cracked her world open. On the bouncy highlight iPod Touch, she sings about her teenage years growing up in the Central Coast's beachside Kincumber, and the fantasy world she conjured catching the 64 bus to school and back, her headphones blaring the warped sounds of Rustie and Yung Lean, artists she was discovering on SoundCloud.
Like an evocative haiku ('It sounds like iPod Touch, yellow Pikachu case/FL Studio free download in my search history/Hidden underneath my pillow 'cause I should be asleep,' she sings), iPod Touch also outlines Wilson's online and musical initiation. She was watching a YouTube tutorial on how to tie-dye denim shorts when the song playing in the video's background undid her. It was, as she later found out, French DJ Madeon's viral Pop Culture (Live Mashup).
'I was like, 'Oh my god, what is this?'' Wilson recalls. 'I had never heard anything like it. It felt like someone had given me crack. I just wanted to know how it was made.'
Growing up on the Central Coast, loving dance music wasn't a normal teenage phase. 'It was mostly skater music, beach music – that was what most of my friends were into. They didn't really like what I was listening to; they thought I'd gone down the rabbit hole,' she says, with a laugh.
Even so, Wilson says she felt primed for a career in electronic music. Her mum, who worked primarily in homoeopathy and remedial massage when Wilson was growing up, and her dad, a tradie, were ex-ravers. Mum, who lived in London in the '90s, even frequented Ministry of Sound and stockpiled the label's CDs. By the time Wilson finished high school, she'd already been named a finalist in triple j's Unearthed High and was booking gigs; her parents were instantly supportive.
'Neither of them went to uni so they were like, 'As long as you are making your own money and working hard, we don't care, go give it a go,'' says Wilson. Since she was 17 and still underage, they'd chaperone her to gigs that generally started after 11pm.
'One time I had a gig and my dad came in his pyjamas and flip-flops, and he got asked to leave the venue because he didn't have the right clothes or shoes,' Wilson says. 'I felt like an undercover agent, like no one knows I'm underage and my dad's not even in the venue. I loved it, it felt like a very dangerous lifestyle.'
It's an odd thing to attempt to describe Ninajirachi's otherworldly sound; you find yourself turning to nonsense like 'scree', 'scronk', 'grunch' and 'glang' to try to convey her off-kilter sonic madness. The drums on CSIRAC, for example – a track named for the first computer to ever play music, now housed at Scienceworks in Melbourne – recall pots and pans tumbling around a washing machine. Closer All at Once is glitched-out subterranean techno filled with cartoon boings, clatters and laser bursts, an intricate symphony of noise.
'I love novelty and surprise, and I'm just always trying to get as close to that feeling of when I first heard stuff like that,' she says. 'I'm never trying to reinvent the wheel because that's just a crazy goal to have. I just want to make something that impresses me or makes me happy.'
After segueing from simple loops on GarageBand as a kid, Wilson's early releases, including her first EP, 2019's Lapland, were made using FL Studio, before she switched to Ableton. 'A lot of it is, like, re-sampling,' Wilson explains of her process. 'If I synthesise something and then re-record it to audio and then do something to that and re-record it to audio again, it becomes this big, long recording of rubbish that I'll then sift through. And then it's like patchwork or collage, getting all the prettiest scraps and putting them together.'
All I Am, a whirring trance track built around an MGMT-style chant, was born from an impromptu jam session at Ben Lee's Los Angeles home, with Lee and Alex Greenwald from Phantom Planet. 'Ben is so kind and generous, and he really supports Australian musicians that come to America,' Wilson says. 'We all microdosed mushrooms and had such a fun, silly day. The idea was I was at the computer and I was the scribe and they would all just bash on different instruments around Ben's studio and I'd record it and try to turn it into something ... I started playing it at shows and it went off, so I messaged them in the group chat, like, 'Can I release this?', and they were like, 'Oh my god, go for it'.'
By I Love My Computer 's second half, technological bliss makes way for dark-web brain-rot. On Infohazard, Wilson's back on her school bus, but now she's being exposed to snuff films and body horror. 'I was so horrified, I couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks, just beheading videos and stuff,' says Wilson, recalling the things older boys with 4chan proclivities would share on the way to school. 'It was a huge loss of innocence moment. It made me think of, if I'd never had the internet, or if I'd been this age even 100 years ago, maybe I would never even know about these things?'
Perhaps most impressively, I Love My Computer showcases Wilson's range, pivoting from the Dare-style indie sleaze of London Song to the sweet PC Music-influenced propulsion of Delete. 'There's this quote from Lorde that I love so much I have it screenshotted on my desktop and I always think about it – it was in a mailing list email she wrote on the 10-year anniversary of Pure Heroine,' Wilson says. 'It's about how every person is sitting on a gold mine that no one can rob because everyone's unique makeup gives them their own perspective. I feel like, as long as I just do what I like, I can trust that my upbringing, experiences, physiology, taste will combine in a way that makes it all feel like me.'
Like every Ninajirachi release since 2018, I Love My Computer comes via NLV Records, the label imprint of Sydney DJ Nina Las Vegas. Having a female mentor to guide her through such a male-dominated industry has been a privilege, Wilson says. 'You're just so naive when you're young, and you don't know what you don't know, and also I don't come from a music family or a white-collar family, so I didn't know anything about business industry stuff. If I hadn't met Nina when I was so young, maybe I would have ended up in other hands who didn't care so much.'
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More recently, Wilson herself has stepped in as mentor and unifier. In 2022, as part of Vivid, she launched Dark Crystal, a club night celebrating underground dance culture. Inspired by overseas parties like Subculture and Heaven (where she once saw her idol, the late electronic artist Sophie, perform), the event proved so popular that this August she'll host its fourth annual instalment.
If privately tinkering in the laptop glow is her musical foundation, performing live is its own reward. 'It's pretty hectic a lot of the time, it's not getting to bed til four or five in the morning and then getting a flight the next day, but I love it,' Wilson says. 'I'm totally sober when I'm touring; I just have heaps of fruit and vitamin C powder, and it's really chill. So even if it's brutal, it's fun. It's all just memory-making.'
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But the film's writing lets it down, with first time at the plate Shaina Steinberg's script just not being consistent with its characters or letting them exist for single jokes. Anna Chlumsky is particularly let down as one of America's finest comedic actresses, as she proved across multiple seasons of the caustic comedy Veep. The inconsistency continues throughout, under-servicing character's like Justin Hartley's best man, and trying to give dialogue and moments to too many characters for any of them to have resonance. There is a good film in here somewhere, but the mix between comedy and action film isn't quite right as well. Some good fight and stunt work being undermined by the filmmakers also trying to make the characters funny or ridiculous at the same time. Perhaps the concept would have worked better as a dark comedy action film. I've certainly known a few bridal parties that have turned dark and violent - I used to be a champagne waiter on a hen's night bus tour. 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It's a funny acknowledgement of the practical machinery of filmmaking, and I will say that Wilson and her stunt partners do get the film's action scenes right. Rebel Wilson is a surprising leading lady, given that her line deliveries always sound like she hasn't read the script and is tossing dialogue out like she's struggling to remember it. I think that's part of her charm, actually, a rough unpolished kind of Hollywood star, and I do want to root for this girl from Sydney's western suburbs to have a long and lucrative career. Wilson plays Sam, invited to join the wedding party of her childhood best friend Betsy (Anna Camp), but struggling to multitask as the hen's night in Paris is happening at the same time as a sting operation Sam is supposed to be working on. Because Sam is actually a secret agent, something her friends are completely unaware of, but she's not a great multitasker, because she kinda blows both things at once. While she goes rogue on her spy agency colleagues which does lead to an arrest but also multiple injuries, she also lets down the bride-to-be with her hair-holding and shot-buying maid-of-honour duties. And so Betsy fires Sam from her duties and appoints her humourless and uptight future sister-in-law Virginia (Anna Chlumsky) instead. Sam might be unaware of her firing as she heads to Betsy's destination wedding. But her presence and secret agent skills are eventually appreciated when a team of international bad guys (led by Stephen Dorff who should have been a bigger star, frankly) crash the wedding looking to loot the family's safe. Look, the set-up for this film is terrific, smashing the Die Hard and Bridesmaids concepts together; it should be a sure-fire hit. Certainly they get the casting right, with the likes of Da'Vine Joy Randolph in the bridal party with the always high energy Anna Camp. But the film's writing lets it down, with first time at the plate Shaina Steinberg's script just not being consistent with its characters or letting them exist for single jokes. Anna Chlumsky is particularly let down as one of America's finest comedic actresses, as she proved across multiple seasons of the caustic comedy Veep. The inconsistency continues throughout, under-servicing character's like Justin Hartley's best man, and trying to give dialogue and moments to too many characters for any of them to have resonance. There is a good film in here somewhere, but the mix between comedy and action film isn't quite right as well. Some good fight and stunt work being undermined by the filmmakers also trying to make the characters funny or ridiculous at the same time. Perhaps the concept would have worked better as a dark comedy action film. I've certainly known a few bridal parties that have turned dark and violent - I used to be a champagne waiter on a hen's night bus tour. Those women scared the heck out of me.
